How Solzhenitsyn hid The Gulag Archipelago in pieces across Moscow
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never kept his account of the Soviet labour camps in one place. Owning it could mean years in prison, so he scattered sections among friends and worked on one part at a time. Finished in 1968, it came out in Paris in 1973, and weeks later he was expelled from the country.
Written between 1958 and 1968, the three-volume work calls itself an experiment in literary investigation. It blends reports, interviews, diaries, legal papers and the author's own years as a prisoner. One thread traces the camp system from 1918 to 1956, from Lenin's first decrees after the revolution through Stalin's purges and show trials to Khrushchev's Secret Speech. The other follows a typical zek, camp slang for inmate, from arrest and trial through transport, forced labour, strikes such as the Kengir uprising, and exile after release. Its most provocative argument puts the roots of the system with Lenin rather than Stalin, treating the camps as a built-in feature of Soviet rule, not an aberration.
Keeping it alive took conspiracy. After the KGB seized his papers in Moscow, he spent 1965 to 1967 turning drafts into typescript while hiding with friends, and for long stretches he stayed at the dacha of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose fame deterred searches. He gave the proofread master copy to Arnold Susi, a former Estonian education minister he had met in Lubyanka Prison in 1945; Susi's daughter Heli hid it in Estonia until 1991. A microfilm went to his lawyer in Zürich, and a paper copy smuggled out later bore the novelist Heinrich Böll's signature on every page to guard against claims of forgery.
In 1973 the KGB interrogated a trusted typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and seized one of the three copies left inside the country. She died in August that year, and Solzhenitsyn, who had hoped for a first edition at home, let the Paris émigré house YMCA-Press print it. English and French translations followed in 1974.
Inside the Soviet Union it spread only as underground samizdat until 1989, when the journal Novy Mir ran a third of it over three issues. Since 2009 an abridged version prepared by his widow has been required reading in Russian schools. The historian Stephen Wheatcroft calls it a literary masterpiece and political indictment, while noting that its estimates of camp numbers ran too high.
Source: The Gulag Archipelago
